T. Boone Pickens was psychoanalyzed Wednesday in front of 450 people who came to the Center for BrainHealth to learn what makes the legendary oilman’s mind tick.

The early-morning fundraiser was sold out, and the Dallas center had to open an auxiliary room to handle the overflow crowd.

Sandi Chapman, the center’s founder, chief director and shrink for the day, discovered that the 84-year-old Pickens is a true live wire.

“After my physical a few years ago,” Pickens cut in before Chapman could ask her first question, “my doctor called me and said, ‘I’ve got some good news and bad.’ I said, ‘OK, give me the good news first.’ He says, ‘You’re going to live to 114. The bad news is you won’t be able to hear or see.’ ”

Most didn’t know that Pickens was making light of his very real hearing woes and macular degeneration. The day before, he had been in Baltimore to get a treatment that involves a needle in the eyeball. To explain his bloodshot left eye, he told folks before the session that he’d been in a barroom scuffle.

Chapman’s first question: “When you’re tackling issues, do you feel that understanding the inside of an idea or an investment is more important than bean counting?”

“Well, I’m not a bean counter,” he answered. “I gained a great deal of confidence because I can see what’s going to happen. My problem is I don’t know when it’s going to happen. Timing has always been a problem for me. Often what I said was going to happen did happen, but I’d worn out on the idea. Other times, my timing has been very, very good.”

Chapman asked whether he was born with insight or developed it over time.

“I’ve thought about that. I’m an only child. I don’t have any siblings to compare, ‘What’d you get? What’d I get?’ I’ve looked at the genes on both sides. My mother was very analytical and a very solid thinker. She was a very good bridge player. She was very close to her mother, who lived next door. And her mother was some kind of genius — a little woman, 110 pounds, who ran everything in sight. Her son-in-law, my dad, was scared to death of her.

“My dad was an excellent poker player and good at hunting and fishing. He never really made any money. His timing was off. He was a smart guy, lawyer. He got into the oil business in ’39 and went broke. … If he ever had any money, he entertained himself.

“I never was good at math. I was so-so at arithmetic, but algebra and geometry wore me out. But I was real quick with numbers. … I got the best of everything.”

Making money

When in Dallas, Pickens gathers his key people to watch the commodities and equities markets open.

“I start every morning with, ‘Does anyone have an idea of how we can make money today?’ If you don’t make money, you go out of business. I don’t care where the idea comes from. If anybody’s got an idea, I’m smart enough to have an open mind.”

A little later in the conversation:

“I can build confidence in people. I’ll say, ‘What do you have to say?’ And they know they have to say something. If they were to say, ‘I don’t have anything to say,’ I’d say, ‘Well, hell, what are you doing in the room?’”

How does he pass on his deal-making abilities?

“I know that the best way to train a bird dog is to get it a quail. If they’re well-bred, they can point and retrieve, but you have to get them in the field.”

The secret to keeping his mind juiced?

“I love to go to work every day. My present wife dreamed of me retiring and settling down in California — even though I told her I would never retire,” he said, giving what might be insight into why the couple are getting what they describe as an amicable divorce. “Somebody said, ‘When are you going to retire?’ I said, ‘Well, what do you do when you retire?’ ‘Well, you can go do what you want to do every day. You can play golf, play tennis, whatever.’ I said, ‘Hell, I’m already retired.’”

On his predictive prowess:

“CNBC said, ‘How are you always so accurate on predicting the oil?’ I said, ‘I watch what that guy in Saudi Arabia says. When he says, ‘We’ve got to have $90-a-barrel oil,’ he’s not kidding. So I waited two weeks and said the same thing he said.’”

Chapman read a paragraph from her soon-to-be-published book, Make Your Brain Smarter, in which she groups Pickens with Albert Einstein, Katharine Graham, Stephen Hawking and Alan Greenspan as having superior brainpower. “Do you think that’s an honest statement?”

“I’m not even in the class with Albert Einstein. I knew Katharine Graham. I could hold up pretty well with her. I know Alan. I sat next to him at a dinner party. I wonder how they gathered those names up and put them in a paragraph,” he said, not catching that “they” was “she.” Or maybe he did.

Is Pickens a morning or evening person?

“I used to keep a legal pad by my bed, and I’d write things down. But I couldn’t read them the next morning. So I figured, ‘Nah, this is a bad idea.’ Morning or evening, I don’t care. It’s whenever the deal shows up.

“I had a writer on my first book, [New York Times columnist] Joe Nocera. I told Joe, ‘We’ve got to hammer this out real quick.’ He said, ‘OK, fine.’ The third day on it, he said, ‘I’m not going to get up at 6 o’clock in the morning to start on it, work all day and then you come in at 6 o’clock, and we work till midnight. I’m a writer and I can’t do anything until 9 o’clock in the morning.’

“I said, ‘What the hell is wrong with you?’ ‘I’ve got to have two cups of coffee. I’ve got to clear my head and think.’ I said, ‘Man, we can’t write this book together.’ And we didn’t. I wrote it myself. Maybe I should have had Joe do it. I might have made more money on it.”

‘Not stressful’

Pickens admits to seeing sand slip through the hourglass.

“You’re 84,” he says. “You know you’re closer to the end than the beginning. So you’ve got a lot of things to accomplish. At the same time, is your life stressful? No, it’s not stressful.

“Somebody said, ‘You still take the same risk that you took when you were 50.’ I do.

“I was worth several billion dollars in 2008. I went from several billion down to one. That’s a lot of money. I didn’t lose any sleep over it, because I figured I’d get it back. I haven’t yet, but I’ve got part of it back.

“Today, at 84, I’m drilling the best wells I’ve ever drilled. I’m getting wells that cost $5 million, and they pay out in five months. I never had that when I was 50 or 60.”

The story that seemed to strike the strongest chord with the audience was about giving the commencement speech at his grandson’s high school.

Pickens saw that the Class of 2007 was nodding off, so he decided to get their attention.

“I said, ‘I’ll tell you what. You’re all sitting there looking at me thinking: I want to be rich like you are. OK, I’ll trade with you today. You be me, and I’ll be you. You get the airplane, the ranch, the bank account, the whole thing, and I’ll take your seat right there.’

“They were, ‘What is he talking about?’ I said, ‘Well, I know I can’t do it, and you know you can’t do it. But the seat you have today, I consider more important that where I am in mine. So I would trade you in a minute if I could.’

“After the deal was over, they were coming up: ‘How big is the ranch?’”